Paradise ponders, playful puppies, gray foxes, and holey yards edition... Yesterday afternoon I took little Cabo for a mile-and-a-half walk, mostly with the aim of doing some leash training. She did very well, actually – being alone (specifically, without her brother Mako along to make trouble) she was fully engaged in what we were doing and learned her leash-limits quickly. She was also smelling absolutely everything in sight, especially any little piles of dried grass that might hide a vole within them. She flushed several of them, but her snapping jaws missed by fractions of an inch each time. She certainly tried hard, though!

The highlight of the walk happened on the way back. I was looking at the road ahead, Cabo just ahead and to my right. Suddenly she went completely berserk, bouncing off the end of the leash, barking like crazy. When I looked where she was looking, I saw a beautiful gray fox about 50' away, loping quickly away from us while staring back at the fearsome Cabo. Nice!

Our back yard now has about ten holes in it, dug by Mark T. and his sidekick Dave. They're locating all the relevant pipes and fittings, and they've now dug out a place to put a 6" gate valve in. This valve will very conveniently control the flow to our sprinkler system along with Tim's irrigation system (a mix of hand-line and underground sprinklers). Both Tim and I will appreciate that. But in the meanwhile, our back yard is a glorious mess – it looks like a WWI battlefield with trenches and places where artillery shells exploded!